some eulogy

My appetite's destroyed.
My lust for life, decayed.
My body soon can meet my soul,
in spiritual parade
- long time coming, stranger.
At last we meet, at least.
At least let's have some pomp
and circumstance. At least,
let's follow where she leads.
I knew that girl, beforelives, man,
She's got a swell baton.
I'd follow her past hell and gone.
We never met down here. We don't believe
in soulmates, now, so much less Valkyries.
And so we die in battle, unselected, on our knees.
Every time.
It's clear there's something wrong:
it's everything they ever gave us to believe.
The game: is rigged, by being not a game,
unruled, unrefereed. At least let's have
some pomp and circumstance,
some eulogy.

A chance to stand,
break down, and tell who's left:
you were this life. This world,
for me.

run

You remember this,
from a thousand dreams
- but it's always real.
So suddenly you're back, this scene:
comes horribly true, just like
you always tried to make it seem,
and play, and feel. This time,

it's live.

Like every time, you try
to find your way, and through. Same
conflict, motivation, arc - each stage
unfolds unmercifully apace. The only part
that fits is you, because you're trapped in it.
You can't get out. You're killing every house
you ever had. The curtain calls go on for nights,
and no one knows if this year's smash hit show
was ever written to be
this sad.

Least of all, the crowd.
Not a dry eye in the place.
The critics are all amateurs.
They're doing it for love because
they hate to let on: they have no taste.

As this year's smash hit show goes on
its record-breaking run, we know:
ten years ago, it was the same
verbatim, line for line, for fun.
It played as uplift, triumph, feel-good
inspiration piece.

And then, a comedy.
And finally now, we weep.
Its truest sense is wrung,
and cut, so dry your eyes,

my love,

you are released.

"The birds greet the morning"

The birds greet the morning
like a bunch of mo-rons
as if at first light, they're already
a crowd of drunks, and
too far gone to modulate
their tone, or even yell a thing
that's interesting, or new, no, just
loud, not listening, talking over each other
their favorite strains: well-practiced
and worn, again and again they rasp
and squawk and trill and call,
and caw, because each only knows
one thing. And they want you to know,
and everyone else. And they're not listening,
but if they were, it would only be for the sound
of some other too far gone one-song asshole
giving them their favorite thing back.
Even with the windows closed, crack!
At the crack of dawn, cacophony and me
inside, wishing I could chime in reasonably,
and quiet the whole milieu, which I can do
with drunks. Drunks also only hear
the sound of their own call,
for the most part, but you can imitate that
and break in, and sing them down. Birds,
though, don't. And being strictly wild, too,
they never learned to use
their inside voice.

Indignation

We let the world go on like this.

We are the ones who let it go
on like this, it is and was
to have been our responsibility. Oh,
I know, we've clocked out for the day, though
haven't we? Done our time, paid our debt
to society, forty fifty sixty hours - isn't
that enough to ask, we've paid our debt! Yours,
mine, ours, plus the freeloading bastard we can't
look in the eye. Bastard winning the game, it's unfair
- doesn't even play. As a species, I know
we've clocked out
as a way of life,
basically. Declared fairness
government's job, I pay my taxes
don't they? Let them
look after it! So
they have.

The responsibility
was ours, but we hired it done, so
You get what you pay and pay and pay
and pay for, don't you know? It's ours,
and was, and was to have been ours
to stop authority

from taking all control.

But through no fault,
blame, or duty of our own, Some few
came along and got the job done
for us. They always do. And let's concede, they bear
a more than passive blame. They deserve, in fact,
credit I suppose, of a kind:

They have worked themselves
assiduously, into the plan,
and actively taken away
the design.

Taken systems designed to harness
ordinary, blameless greed into channels that serve
the common weal and need, taken systems designed
to create landscapes that are rigged so that
justice is the lazier path, the easier outcome to achieve,
landscapes where injustice has to work for its gains,
and work again and take pains to get away with them - oh,
there are always those few,
in every age, but - that's precisely why
they are not our excuse. They are
always present. In every age. We can't deny we knew
about these assholes. There are always a few,
and let lesson be learned, please: it only
takes a few, when you hand the whole thing
over to them, tell them it's their job, and
not to bother you.

Those few have taken all the systems we could monkey up
together in common trust to make common good common,
commonplace, easy, or at least - more commonplace, easier.
All the systems we gimmicked to put a fix in, build fairness
into the course of things as the path of least resistance
- those fucking few, who are always with us in every age
have finally hit the jackpot in ours, and really -
in a few hundred years, and purely on merit,
they have completely clipped and rigged
every system to benefit the great many
no longer, and the petty few
always, instead.

What is justice, but the very human effort
to take an unfair world and rig it in ways
that make fairer results more commonplace
than could naturally occur?

There will be an accounting, but don't worry
if you are bad at math, and law, and government,
and whatever else the job requires, don't worry
- it will be someone else's job after all. Won't it?
Isn't it? We pay our taxes, don't we? The Greater Good
is none of our concern, and so

it never is. The Greater Good never
is ours, but there will be an accounting,
don't you worry. It will not involve any
of the numbers
you know.

Indignity

The flies land on eyes
too dry to close,
and logos run filthy all over
the clothes, where there are any. Limbs,
bellies, minds ache, naked

and wither with hope - nothing can take it

but death, at least, comes often
and ceremoniously. Everything explained
by a pantheon - alive where nothing else
could possibly survive, God
looks down, and looks on,
and lives on.

God's in Its heaven and the kids
are alright. Peace on earth,
to everyone willing
to give up

the fight.

the change

Love is the change, the strangeness, the charm,
the damage another has done to your view.
The cracks in your world that were always there, that now
you can not only see, but walk through - and love
is what's on the other side, too.
And love is on your side
all over, as well.
That's what they've done to you.
If you've done it to them,
then it's heaven.
If not, it is hell.

"masterplan (revised)"

You make me want to plan together with you
some spectacular crime that will shock the world
and everyone will say we're so devious
and so deviant and so dangerous, that
the only possible way to deal with it
would be to build a special prison
with just you and me in it.